A stunning book that offers an eloquent portrait of an antisemitic attack and its effect on a neighborhood.
How did “the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history” change a Pittsburgh neighborhood and its residents? A gifted journalist sought answers.
In the 1840s, Oppenheimer’s ancestors settled in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, “a little Jewish Eden” that would become “the oldest, the most stable, most internally diverse Jewish neighborhood” in the U.S. and the place his father grew up. So the author wondered how it would respond after a White nationalist killed 11 Sabbath-observers in a synagogue that housed two Conservative congregations, Tree of Life and New Light, and the Reconstructionist Dor Hadash, on Oct. 27, 2018: “When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?” In this sensitive and beautifully written account of how Squirrel Hill changed in the year after the attack, Oppenheimer takes an approach rarely seen in books about mass shootings, which tend to focus on the killer or victims. He instead surveys others touched by the tragedy. Many are Jews, including a rabbi leading his first post-attack High Holy Days services and Orthodox volunteer “shomrim,” or “guards of the dead,” who stayed with the bodies until the medical examiner removed them. Other subjects come from different faith traditions—e.g., an Iranian student who set up a GoFundMe account, a Catholic artist who created a window display for Starbucks, the “trauma tourists” who unhelpfully left “condolence cards that promised that the victims had already met Jesus in Heaven.” In this wonderfully rendered narrative, Oppenheimer deftly shows how, when emotions are raw, the best intentions can misfire or fail to satisfy everyone: When civic leaders tried to keep attack-related events apolitical, some residents felt more benefit would have come from the kind of activism shown by students after the Parkland shootings. While the Tree of Life massacre targeted Jews, this book abounds with insights for cities facing the aftermath of any mass-casualty event.
A stunning book that offers an eloquent portrait of an antisemitic attack and its effect on a neighborhood.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65719-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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